Calibrating Noise for Group Privacy in Subsampled Mechanisms

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Jiang, Yangfan, Luo, Xinjian, Yang, Yin, Xiao, Xiaokui
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Jiang, Yangfan
Luo, Xinjian
Yang, Yin
Xiao, Xiaokui
author_facet Jiang, Yangfan
Luo, Xinjian
Yang, Yin
Xiao, Xiaokui
contents Given a group size m and a sensitive dataset D, group privacy (GP) releases information about D with the guarantee that the adversary cannot infer with high confidence whether the underlying data is D or a neighboring dataset D' that differs from D by m records. GP generalizes the well-established notion of differential privacy (DP) for protecting individuals' privacy; in particular, when m=1, GP reduces to DP. Compared to DP, GP is capable of protecting the sensitive aggregate information of a group of up to m individuals, e.g., the average annual income among members of a yacht club. Despite its longstanding presence in the research literature and its promising applications, GP is often treated as an afterthought, with most approaches first developing a DP mechanism and then using a generic conversion to adapt it for GP, treating the DP solution as a black box. As we point out in the paper, this methodology is suboptimal when the underlying DP solution involves subsampling, e.g., in the classic DP-SGD method for training deep learning models. In this case, the DP-to-GP conversion is overly pessimistic in its analysis, leading to low utility in the published results under GP. Motivated by this, we propose a novel analysis framework that provides tight privacy accounting for subsampled GP mechanisms. Instead of converting a black-box DP mechanism to GP, our solution carefully analyzes and utilizes the inherent randomness in subsampled mechanisms, leading to a substantially improved bound on the privacy loss with respect to GP. The proposed solution applies to a wide variety of foundational mechanisms with subsampling. Extensive experiments with real datasets demonstrate that compared to the baseline convert-from-blackbox-DP approach, our GP mechanisms achieve noise reductions of over an order of magnitude in several practical settings, including deep neural network training.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_09943
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Calibrating Noise for Group Privacy in Subsampled Mechanisms
Jiang, Yangfan
Luo, Xinjian
Yang, Yin
Xiao, Xiaokui
Cryptography and Security
Given a group size m and a sensitive dataset D, group privacy (GP) releases information about D with the guarantee that the adversary cannot infer with high confidence whether the underlying data is D or a neighboring dataset D' that differs from D by m records. GP generalizes the well-established notion of differential privacy (DP) for protecting individuals' privacy; in particular, when m=1, GP reduces to DP. Compared to DP, GP is capable of protecting the sensitive aggregate information of a group of up to m individuals, e.g., the average annual income among members of a yacht club. Despite its longstanding presence in the research literature and its promising applications, GP is often treated as an afterthought, with most approaches first developing a DP mechanism and then using a generic conversion to adapt it for GP, treating the DP solution as a black box. As we point out in the paper, this methodology is suboptimal when the underlying DP solution involves subsampling, e.g., in the classic DP-SGD method for training deep learning models. In this case, the DP-to-GP conversion is overly pessimistic in its analysis, leading to low utility in the published results under GP. Motivated by this, we propose a novel analysis framework that provides tight privacy accounting for subsampled GP mechanisms. Instead of converting a black-box DP mechanism to GP, our solution carefully analyzes and utilizes the inherent randomness in subsampled mechanisms, leading to a substantially improved bound on the privacy loss with respect to GP. The proposed solution applies to a wide variety of foundational mechanisms with subsampling. Extensive experiments with real datasets demonstrate that compared to the baseline convert-from-blackbox-DP approach, our GP mechanisms achieve noise reductions of over an order of magnitude in several practical settings, including deep neural network training.
title Calibrating Noise for Group Privacy in Subsampled Mechanisms
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09943